Bowling for columbine is a documentary that explores the gun laws in america, this was triggered after the the columbine school shooting, the shooting was horrific and ended with 12 students and one teacher loosing their lives. the documentary was created by a man called Michael Moore, he targeted the reason why the shooting too place, the overall documentary was about the shooting however it was more directed towards why the shooting actually happened, this led to research into the gun laws that are in place in america.
After watching parts of the documentary i can see that the audience readership is more dominant than any other, the reason for this is because the documenters narration is rather biased against the laws, he has parts of sarcasm within his narration, its not exactly what he's saying but the way he says them. He expects the audience to share the same opinion.
The dominant audience which is definitely Moore's preferred readership would listen to Moore's opinions and take them as there own, wen Moore blames the influence on the media and government they will believe him. Moore reeled of some facts about the number of deaths in different country's through guns etc. "France had 225 deaths by guns, Germany had 381, Canada had 165, the UK had 68, Australia had 65, Japan 39 and America 11,127" after a dominant audience hears this they instantly blame the gun laws etc. if there where no guns like the UK this death pole could be reduced, with him stating this you can definitely draw a more biased and dominant view rather than a impartial one.
The documentary is definitely targeting the dominant audience however there is some sense of negotiated, through out the documentary Moore takes into account different sides of the story and allows the audience to have a choice of different situations. i would say that this program doesn't draw a negotiated audience however some of the points made could be negotiated in terms of the overall outcome and what happened to provoke the attack.
After the shooting happened all heads turned towards what happened and what where the reasons for such a violent attack, in the documentary it shows a montage of different people giving there opinions, many ideas where listed for examples, tv, video games, violent movies, entertainment, cartoons etc. the world decided to speculate and pass the blame. The documentary then explored why many people turned to Marilyn Manson and passed the blame, the media and public decided to target Marilyn Manson for his violent videos and how he promotes "violence, suicide and death", they led the public to believe that killers would watch content like his videos and it would lead them to this violent attack.
At the same time the attack took place the american army was dropping more bombs than ever in war however some how people still think that a singer could have been the real cause. Marilyn actually goes on to explain how the media didn't target this and how the media actually target their audience and pump fear into them and brain wash them into believing what they want. Although Moore actually gave different sides to the story he also used a tone to push people more towards the government being the influence and the laws are more the problem. Although he was giving two sides he also used a certain tone to make the dominant audience side with him.
As well as this audience having impact on both dominant and negotiated audiences, it could also have an effect on the oppositional audience, Moore wouldn't want this audience however the audience could watch and have their own mind made up, for example in the short clip of Marilyn Manson there is a religious spokes men that is protesting against the singer, he preaches that " he doesn't want the violent tones, or suicide etc"that is an audience that wouldn't even think of any other situation, its Marilyn doing and the media and government have no part.
After applying the reception theory to the programme the preferred readership is most definitely dominant however i think you can apply each audience to the subject and draw different aspects and different views.
No comments:
Post a Comment